Bandcrash early alpha/beta/whatever released

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So hey, the Bandcrash GUI is finally, finally in a working state! You can now use it to easily encode a bunch of wav files into mp3/ogg/flac and make a web preview, and optionally upload it all to itch.io automagically!

Also, I’ve released prebuilt macOS and Windows binaries over on itch.io. I’ll probably do a Linux version as well at some point, although Linux users are likely much better-equipped to just build-and-install it themselves.

To that end, I used it to upload one of my older albums to itch, and I gotta say, having a GUI to set it up is actually a lot nicer than doing it all from the CLI with hand-written JSON files? Weird.

There’s still a lot left to do on it but what is there right now is Good Enough for now.

That said, I’m hopeful that bandcamp remains viable for the long term, but now it’s a lot less necessary to worry about a single platform like that.

Goodbye pyBlamscamp, hello Bandcrash!

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As mentioned earlier today, the pyBlamscamp name was incredibly confusing and needed to be changed. Thankfully, blackle mori (who made blamscamp in the first place) came up with a much better name suggestion, “Bandcrash.” I have now renamed pyBlamscamp and its associated Python package appropriately. The blamscamp pypi project now just exists as a thin wrapper around bandcrash and its usage should be discontinued.

Existing installations should continue to work (and might even pull in future updates!) but it’s highly recommended that any scripts, venvs, etc. that rely on it be updated with the new package.

And of course this gives me even more of an impetus to finally write that damn GUI.

pyBlamscamp updated, and it should probably be renamed

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Because of the recent shenanigans I’ve been working on pyBlamscamp again.

For now I’ve just been working on refactoring it to make a GUI possible, and improving performance by actually parallelizing execution wherever possible. And it’s a lot faster now! On my Mac studio (with the files hosted on my NAS), it now takes only 13 seconds to do the full encode of Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, down from the previous 105. That’s 8 times as fast! (Presumably it’s mostly I/O bound, what with retrieving the .wav files over gigabit Ethernet, and it would be much faster if the source files were on my local volume.)

So, anyway. My next step will, of course, be to make an actual GUI. Because it’s pretty clear that such a thing would be useful.

Also I should probably rename it. It’s caused quite a lot of confusion, and people don’t seem to understand that pyBlamscamp does way more than the original Blamscamp, but isn’t (yet) as user-friendly. It’s also very much diverged at this point.

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Bandcamp United

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So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.

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